Electroluminescence in light emitting diodes, LED's, is useful in a number of applications including coupling between different chips of a circuit, driving an optical fiber communication system and driving a remote phased antenna array. Unfortunately, however, the LED's currently available are fabricated with GaAs so that they cannot, at the present time, be practicably integrated into circuits for the aforementioned applications and others that are generally formed in a silicon, Si, substrate.
The existence of photoluminescence in porous silicon has been reported in an article by L. T. Canham entitled "Silicon Quantum Wire Array Fabrication by Electrochemical and Chemical Dissolution of Wafers" that appeared at page 1046 of "Applied Physics Letters 57" of September 1990, and in an article by V. Lehmann and U. Gosele entitled "Porous Silicon Formation: A Quantum Wire Effect" that appeared at page 856 of "Applied Physics Letters 58" of February 1991, but no suggestion is made therein of a way of utilizing porous silicon for producing electroluminescence in an LED.